Catherine of Siena writes the pope
A laywoman commands the pope to come home
Catherine Benincasa is the twenty-third of twenty-five children of a Sienese dyer. She joins the Dominican tertiaries at sixteen — women who take vows but live in the world rather than in enclosed communities. She spends years in her cell, then emerges into increasingly public activity: caring for the sick during the plague, mediating political disputes, attracting a circle of disciples who call her Mamma.
And then she begins to write letters.
She dictates them — she is initially illiterate, though she learns to read and eventually to write — to secretaries who travel with her. The letters go to popes, cardinals, queens, city councils, and condottieri. They are addressed to everyone with the same directness: this is what God requires of you. This is where you are failing. Here is the correction.
Her letters to Gregory XI are remarkable documents. She does not flatter him. She calls him daddy — babbo — in a tone that is simultaneously affectionate and commanding. She tells him he is a coward for staying in Avignon. She tells him the men around him are self-serving flatterers who do not serve his soul. She tells him Christ is waiting for him in Rome.
She writes as if she has no doubt that what she is saying is true, no doubt that he needs to hear it, and no doubt that God has given her the commission to say it.
Gregory returns to Rome in January 1377. He tells his advisors afterward that he was afraid of one small woman.
He means it as a compliment.
“Be the man I want you to be. Have the courage to be afraid of nothing but sin.”
— Catherine of Siena, Letter to Gregory XI, c. 1376 AD
“For if you altogether hold your peace at this time, then will relief and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place, but you and your father's house will perish: and who knows whether you haven't come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”
Gregory XI returned to Rome because he was afraid of one small woman. He meant it as praise.
Catherine's authority was entirely moral. She had no office, no title, no army, no political leverage. She had conviction and directness and an absolute certainty that what needed to be said was worth saying regardless of who needed to hear it.
The most powerful force in the medieval church at that moment was not a pope or an emperor. It was a dyer's daughter from Siena who had decided that love required telling the truth.
You have been placed where you are for such a time as this. Not to flatter the powerful or manage the comfortable but to speak what needs to be spoken to whoever needs to hear it.
What is the truth that needs to be said in your sphere, and who needs to hear it from you specifically?